In the hours when the bat and the owl come into their own kingdom, Isca turned to Garroch the King as they lay in their bed. In the last glow of the wood fire she saw that his dark eyes were still open and that he was awake.
‘Garroch,’ she said, ‘I have had a dream. In my first sleeping a vision came to me and a great voice that bellowed like a rutting bull spoke the words to it.’
Garroch smiled wryly at this, for he too had had a dream. That was why she had suddenly caught him awake. His dream had frightened him into waking, for in it the worm had crept into his mouth and had made there a home for itself. He had sprung awake, his throat dry and ready to scream, his heart thumping wildly. But before he had yelled in his terror of the death sign, Isca had turned to him and had looked sharply into his eyes. That look chased his dream away and he cherished this woman more than ever for her powerful magic over the darkness.
‘Yes, my Queen,’ he said, ‘and what was your dream?’
Isca said, ‘At first all the darkness, all the world, was swirling before my eyes in a great wheel. Then in the centre of the wheel I saw the head of Barduca; not the yellow wasted bundle of rag that it is now, but as it used to be in his time of power and glory when he would look down on me in the firelight as we lay on such a bed as this.’
Garroch felt his muscles shiver at her words. ‘Tell me your dream, my love,’ he said.
And Isca said, ‘The voice of Barduca bellowed down at me like the roaring of the wind in the winter trees.’
‘Have done with Barduca!’ shouted Garroch, rising up in his angry bed. ‘Tell me your dream!’
But Isca spoke back at him calmly. ‘The voice was the dream,’ she said, ‘for as the voice spoke the words, I saw their pictures as I slept.’
Garroch grunted with impatient anger. ‘Then speak the words of the dream,’ he said, ‘Barduca’s words.’
And Isca said, ‘These are the words that pale mouth roared at me:
“I was once the King of the Sun.
Now my head is drying on a stake
Over the smoking fire of another King.
Let him beware—I still can speak.
I tell him that his house is no fit place
For a Sun King’s head to dry in;
No place for the Sun to be remembered.
Let him beware—I shall speak again
Until he has housed me afresh
In a place that is worthy of the Sun”.’
Garroch looked at the woman as she chanted. Her eyes were wide and fixed above his head. Her body lay stiff, away from him. He bowed his head in respect and listened to her words.
‘ “Let Garroch the Sun King build afresh!
Let Garroch build to the Sun or lose his crown.
So, in a place high on the hill
Shall he prepare a house fit for a King.
Let him dig the foundations deep,
For it must endure to the ending of the world.
Fetch greenstone from the West for all the walls,
Sun asks no common flint.
The King post of this house is finest oak
Plated with coloured ornaments.
The roof is first of osiers, whitely peeled,
And over them the hide of blackest bulls.
And there shall be, within, a pit for fire
Ringed round about with glistening quartz;
And after that a dancing-floor of pine,
Where men shall see a vision after wine.
Then shall there be a gentle feasting place
Where men may set their meat on stools of stone.
Last, and in memory of me, the sleeping-stalls,
Built close against the wall, of slate cut smooth,
Furnished with beds of bracken, covered deep
With skins, with fleece of whitest sheep,
Where men shall rob the honeyed hive of sleep”.’
And when Isca had said these words, her eyes closed again and she lay on her back, breathing gently. Garroch spoke to her at last in his bewilderment but she did not answer.
And in the morning when he asked her about her dream, she only smiled and shook her head. Then she repeated those words again, just as she had spoken them before, but where she had heard them she did not know, she said.
Then Garroch was sure that these words were a message that must not be disobeyed, and so, although the cold time of the year had almost come upon the village, he set about building the great house that would be a fitting home for such a one as he, the King of the Sun.
And all the time Cradoc watched, stroking his thin beard, waiting for his moment to come, sending back word to Vedrix by the shore from time to time, and already wondering how it felt to wear that thin gold circlet which he had seen so often and had always envied.
The house grew swiftly, for there were many folk to work upon it. While the dark men of Craig Dun levelled a great shelf half-way up the hill with their shoulder-blade shovels and their antler horn picks, the golden men rode to the west dragging light sledges behind them for the famous green stone. And they were scarcely out of sight before the red men of Kaa Fox lit a fierce fire beside the trunk of the straightest oak they could find, and brought it crashing down with their strong hide ropes and their heavy stone axes, chopping deep into the charcoal that the fires had left, spattering each other’s faces and then laughing to see their comrades so black with soot.
And the women gathered osiers by the river, many bundles of the lithe green withies, even the women who were lightly pregnant, all anxious to fill their part: and at night by the fires in the compound they would peel the whipping rods and weave them together, until at last they had made hurdle after white hurdle that would be lashed to each other to form a tall roof about the smooth oak kingpost soon.
And hardly had the great kingpost been sunk, deep into its foundations in the chalk, its red-haired hauliers cheering at their success as it rose on the tough thongs, when the King himself, Garroch the Dark One, as he was now called, went over the hill to the great corrals and himself chose the black bulls whose hides should gain honour as his roof, selecting this one, rejecting that one, choosing the shiniest black bulls, refusing those that had the slightest patch of sable, the smallest tuft of white hairs . . .
And as he chose, indicating his wish by a movement of his long antler wand, the small dark killers would run forth, leaping on to the back of the doomed beast, clasping its muzzle to draw back the puzzled head, and then with the other grim hand dragging the keen flint knife across its throat. The corrals were full of bewildered cattle that day, both living and dead, for such a slaughter had never been known on the hills before.
And when Isca saw the flayed carcases she said, ‘Such meat should not waste, my husband. To celebrate the building of the great house, let there be a feast. We shall all eat well on this bull-meat!’
Garroch said, ‘Then we must tell them all, and they will hurry with the building, for they will know that the fly will taste the meat first if they do not hasten!’
And as he had said, the workers hastened, their bodies gleaming with sweat to raise the great hall in time for the feast. The riders came back from the west, short of many horses that had dragged out their guts with the heavy rock, the magic green rock; but they were content when they heard of the feast. So were those who quarried the bright quartz and set it about the fire pit. So were the patient men who felled the pines and then, with their heavy axes swinging between their legs, chipped and chipped the awkward wood until they had made smooth planks for a dancing floor, as the King had commanded.
So the house grew, and the children both black and gold in the village below looked up at it each day pointing and said, ‘Aiee! Look, it is higher now than it was when the sun awoke!’ And later in the day they would point again and say, ‘Aiee! But look, my brothers, it is as tall as the sky!’
And the sheep were killed as the bulls had been killed—their fleeces to make comfort, their flesh to fill the cooking-pots at feast-time.
And the tribes from afar who had received peremptory messages from this terrible Dark King came into the steading at last, dragging great slabs of flint on sledges for the walled cubicles of the palace, cursing Garroch with every breath but the one that brought them inside his stockade—then praising him as the greatest of Kings, as indeed he was, for no man of authority in the land had ever before raised such a monument to his power and to the power of the God he served.
This Garroch, son of Marrag, was the first great King of a land that would one day have many great Kings. But he was the first. Though he made no laws, he was a Great One and a Great Captain. Yet he is forgotten, and his great palace has long since been only a dream—a dream that breathes past the end of the corridor of forgetfulness, to be caught as a fleeting vision only by the poet, the seer, the magician, and sometimes the warrior. Yet he built this house, on the hill, because Barduca had spoken in Isca’s dream. He built it because he was now the plaything of a greater King, the Sun Himself.
And many times Garroch toyed with the notion of tearing down the Old Woman stone—which signified Earth Mother—just outside the village; but each time he wavered and then told his dark ones to leave the stone for yet another day. He did not tell them of his dreams, of Marrag shaking a warning finger at him, of Brach weeping at his feet for the stone’s sake. Marrag and Brach were precious to him still, though now they were ghosts who only came to him at night in his sleep. He had loved his father and adored his daughter, and they were gone from him and were dead, he thought. Dead and locked for ever in the House of Sleep—had he not heard them as he lay there, bound with the thongs, painted with the blood-clay?
And sometimes he thought of Rua—poor Rua! He pitied her for she had loved him though he had not wanted her love. Once, with a cold shock, he had realised that she had killed her father, Kraka, for his sake. That disturbed the sleep of Garroch for many nights, for it was taboo to kill a father, or any of one’s blood. Just as it was taboo to go into one’s sister. That began to trouble Garroch too and he said to Isca:
‘My Queen, are you certain that you are not my sister?’
Isca struck him across his backside, not too gently, and said, ‘Yes, of course I am your sister. I am your grandmother as well. You can see that by my hair—it is golden, and yours is black. That is the law; the brother is always black-haired and the sister golden! No cattle are ever the same colour, out of one mother!’
Then she took his mind away from this matter, and by the morning he had forgotten what had troubled him.
And so, almost as by a miracle, it was the time for the feast; the feast in Garroch’s great hall, set above the village, on the side of the hill.
Asa Wolf had watched all, and when the place was ready, he said to Garroch, ‘My brother, you may make many mistakes as the years walk on, but the greatest mistake now could be not to ask my brother Kaa Fox and his folk to your feast. They love you and have helped you; do not forget them in favour of the black and the gold ones.’
Garroch said, ‘My brother, may this hand rot from me if I ever forget their goodness to me. Without them I would not be a King now. They shall come, the greatest of them, and sit in the house with the greatest of the others. I will ask Kaa Fox, our brother, to bring fifty of his greatest men. Is that well?’
And Asa Wolf bent and kissed the hem of Garroch’s tunic.
‘Yes, brother mine,’ he said, ‘it is well. That is the fulfilment of my dream.’
And when he had gone, Isca said to Garroch, ‘My husband, my little black husband, I think I love you as much as I have ever known how to love anything, including myself! I love you so much that I hardly notice the other men in this steading—hardly, my husband, for I am not yet an old woman! Yes, I love you, Garroch, the King, and I would let them cut from me any part they wished if it would save you in your distress. But make no error, my love, no error at all, this Asa loves you more deeply than I ever could, though I let them rip out my breathing heart. You must never betray this man, Garroch, or the hill above us would crumble to dust and the world fall from under our feet.’
And Garroch placed his arm about her strong waist and drew her to him. He said, ‘My Queen, I hear all that you have said, and for my part I would do as much for you. The women I once knew are no longer living, as far as these eyes may tell me. And I also know what you say of the hill and the world. And I say to you now, here on the great hill with our palace below us for witness, that should I ever betray Asa Wolf, my brother in blood, may the Sun Himself strike me down, and may Earth Mother come up for vengeance and tear from me my claim to manhood with her teeth!’
A curlew swung low over the twilit hill, almost screaming in their ears. Isca shuddered and pulled her robe about her.
‘Let us go down to the fires, husband,’ she said. ‘We are two fools to speak such words up here, at such a time.’
Then the two frightened ones went down towards the glowing fires, trying not to run lest each should accuse the other of cowardice, and laughing secretly at the same time, when they glimpsed each other’s eyes in the light of the rising moon.
For that is the way the creatures are—they know the game, they know the delusion, both in themselves and also in the others. Yet they also know the fear, and that comes from the deep truth that they both share, the truth that they would hide. And though they jest, the fear is still there; and it is the fear that is with them when they die, not the jesting, in that last lonely moment.